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Homegrown talent

Nadia Latif has got a new tattoo. A geometric pattern to mark a joyful occasion, the publication of Homegrown, the play she created with the writer Omar El-Khairy about young people joining Isis. They wanted to examine how the phenomenon also related to race and gender and Britishness. It’s been a long time coming.

The play was first meant to be performed in schools, in 2015. Commissioned by the National Youth Theatre (NYT), the ambitious work involved 112 young people aged between 14 and 18. El-Khairy and Latif had 70 per cent of the script already written and were asked to devise the remainder of the scenes with the young people.

In the script, the audience are led by “tour guides” – ostensibly giving a tour of the school classrooms, where debates on race, Islamophobia and radicalisation occur between the pupils. The idea is that an audience member could see completely different scenes from the person they arrived with.

“So you’d have to have conversations at the end,” says Latif. “There was no way to say everything we wanted to say in an hour and a half so the audience had to converse for us.”
The scenes are sometimes shocking but they are there for a reason – to facilitate conversation about things we don’t usually have the tools to talk about, or feel uncomfortable talking about.

Young voices: Co-creators Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif at the Index on Censorship event

Controversial themes

Some characters in Homegrown sympathise with Mohammed Emwazi (aka Jihadi John), the British-born jihadist who was seen on a video released by Isis beheading an American journalist. This is balanced by characters who vehemently oppose his actions. Here’s a typical extract:

MUSLIM BOY: Right. When a white guy goes in and blows shit up, it’s always like: “Oh, he had mental problems. He went off his f*****g medication.” But if a Muslim dude did the same shit, or a Middle Eastern guy, and yells out: “Allahu Akbar”.
BLACK BOY: Suddenly it’s Islam, Islam’s the problem.

Latif was trying to avoid the “grotesque talk about how people ‘do’ the problem of Islam… [so] the tour guides talk about identity essentialism gone mad”.
If the aim was to spark debate they certainly achieved it, although not in the way they had hoped.

An abrupt end

The play was cancelled by the NYT just two weeks before it was due to be performed, in August 2015. Later that month an open letter was sent to the NYT, stating “We fear that government policy in response to extremism may be creating a culture of caution in the arts,” and asking for more clarification on why the play was cancelled. It was signed by, among others, Sir David Hare and Simon Callow.

In September 2015, a Freedom of Information request uncovered an email from Paul Roseby, the artistic director of the NYT, that was sent to Arts Council England on 30 July 2015, in which Roseby expressed concern about the play’s “one-dimensional tone and opinion” and criticised El-Khairy and Latif’s “extremist agenda”. He says he’d consulted with the Metropolitan Police on the play.

Roseby issued a statement on 4 September 2015. It’s the same statement I was sent when I asked for a comment for this feature. It said the play required “editorial balance” and “justification” due to the sensitive material and cited unfinished work – the creators dispute this.

In March this year, an extract from the play was performed at an Index on Censorship event in London by members of the original cast at which the artistic director of the Bush theatre, Madani Younis, talked about the “concussive” effect of being a Muslim in the UK.

Bright young things

“A lot of the young people actually had really intelligent responses to the play being cancelled,” says Latif. “They said things like: ‘We may be young but we are artists and our art is being silenced’. In many ways there is no such thing as theatre for young people. They are just as sophisticated and have a take on all these things.”

Shami Chakrabarti, then leader of civil rights group Liberty, got in touch after the play had been cancelled and Latif and El-Khairy went through the script with Liberty’s lawyers to check whether there was something legally dubious about the script. “They came back and said there was nothing legally wrong with it,” says Latif. “Not even close.”

Now, after the duo made the decision to self-publish, Homegrown is available and readers can decide for themselves if they think it was worth shutting down. Latif says she still doesn’t understand why it happened.

Becoming Mohammed

In the two years that have passed, other works addressing similar themes have come to fruition. Annemiek van Elst’s Becoming Mohammed is at the Pleasance in London from 2 May. It’s a personal story about the Dutch director’s brother’s conversion to Islam.

A personal view of Islam: Becoming Mohammed Credit: Claudia Marinaro

“The influence of negativity in the media affected me,” says van Elst, speaking about her reaction to his conversion. “I was really scared and disappointed, whereas if he converted to Buddhism or Christianity, I wouldn’t be and I was disappointed in myself for those feelings. I hope audiences get a sense of humanity from the show, which is taken away from the message here in the news.”

A wave of voices

Comedian Shazia Mirza’s show The Kardashians Made Me Do It, which she has been touring for 18 months, is inspired by the three teenage girls from east London who left the UK to join Isis in 2015. The stand-up show is in part about the seductive appeal of Isis to teenagers. She describes Isis as “the One Direction of Islam”.

Across the pond, Negin Farsad’s film The Muslims Are Coming! and her book How to make White People Laugh both attempt to dismantle stereotypes of Muslims in the US with a light touch.
It seems that the arts world has caught up with what Latif and El-Khairy were trying to achieve, and the more stories there are out there, the more nuanced our understanding will be.

Chimene Suleyman, author of the poetry collection Outside Looking On and contributor to The Good Immigrant, which was voted Britain’s favourite book of 2016 by the Books Are My Bag Awards, says the arguments in Homegrown are essential to understanding a culture that is often misunderstood. “If you are a young Muslim who has grown up in a post-9/11 society, watching your motherland set ablaze by the same governments that blame you for it; if you are a young Muslim who has grown up watching your mother’s hijab ripped from her head; if you have been called names, and repeatedly referenced in your news and TV shows as terror – are you likely to dislike the West? Sure.

“[But] it is nonsense to assume such a dramatic leap between human aggressive thoughts against your oppressor, and then joining Isil [Isis] or cheering beheadings.”
Latif says they still have a long journey ahead. “All anyone wants us to write about now is radicalism and Islam and no one looks at me as a woman, or middle class,” she says. But, she adds, we have to stop carving up our identities in this way.

“You also have to look at whether the work [considers] all the other influences, there are socioeconomic issues and gender and racism and Islamophobia – these things are all linked and creating a culture… the tapestry that makes up this country, of which we are proud.”

The question remains: now that the play has been published, will a theatre commission it? It surely warrants a platform.

Ella Hickson on her new play Anna: ‘If a woman happens to write a play with women in it, it gets called feminist’

Jessica Barden on Pinter and the return of ‘The End of the F***ing World’: ‘I struggle with anxiety. Being on stage can be terrible’

AI: More than Human at the Barbican avoids the more disturbing aspects of its subject

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